


Middle

by hannahrhen



Series: Ice and Dust and Light [6]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Loki Does What He Wants, M/M, Mpreg, Sexual Content, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-12
Updated: 2012-11-12
Packaged: 2017-11-18 11:24:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/560522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hannahrhen/pseuds/hannahrhen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki is thicker around the middle … and remaining silent. Tony is suspicious … and getting angry.</p><p>Prequel to "Segundo."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Middle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AMoriarty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMoriarty/gifts).



> AMoriarty left this comment on "Segundo": "Aside from how awesome it is to know they have another one together, maybe a little prequel? 'Cause truthfully I'm shocked to find Loki just ready to give birth."
> 
> So, this is how Colin might have come to be ...

Tony couldn’t shake the suspicion he’d been harboring for a week. It had settled in the back of his mind one evening when Loki had taken their son for one of the frequent, mysterious jaunts too close to the boy’s bedtime. Raising the delighted Fray up to his shoulders, Loki’s form had curved, arched—Tony couldn’t help but admire it—and then …

He’d cocked his head, squinting. Loki appeared—thicker—around the middle. Just a little—

No. Tony had snorted at his own absurdity. _Nope, nope, nope …_

Loki had looked over at him them, part of the leave-taking ritual. A brusque nod, returned by Tony, and the god had disappeared, Fray with him. His rounded middle, gone in a wisp of smoke.

No, Tony insisted to himself again. There was _no way_ Loki was pregnant.

 

…

And yet …

Tony couldn’t deny that Loki’s shape had changed. The layers of fabric and leather and metal hid much—in theory. In reality, however, the lines highlighted his shoulders, chest, and waist in a way that Tony frequently found delicious when he didn’t find it so baffling. Those lines now, he was almost certain, curved slightly outward rather than sharply inward.

No longer concave, but convex.

And, of course, Loki still deigned—as he termed it—to share Tony’s bed most nights, when hiding anything was a near impossibility. Not long after Tony had first noticed, he found himself on his belly on the covers, head between Loki’s legs, trying to see how loud the liar-god would scream from Tony’s talented tongue on his balls and in his ass. He looked up at Loki’s face, shiny with sweat, eyes unfocused and fixed toward the ceiling, when he realized … Loki’s stomach, usually a near-perfect plane, was in the way. Not much. But a definite … swell.

Tony reached a single hand up from where it pulled Loki’s left thigh outward, circled his hip, and rested it right over his navel with a slow caress. He watched the god’s face carefully as Tony kissed and then nibbled the soft skin near the joining of his thigh and pelvis. His hand continued to sweep soothingly over the lower expanse of Loki’s abdomen.

Loki’s head jerked up, and he met Tony’s eyes.

“Is there something you want to say?” Tony finally ventured. He rubbed his temple, hair no doubt ticklish, against Loki’s flesh.

Eyes narrowed, Loki deliberately brought his own hand up, grasped Tony’s wrist, and pulled it off his stomach. He dropped it pointedly back near where his splayed leg met his hip.

“Yes.” A moment. “I want you to make me come, Stark.”

Tony bit his leg sharply, deftly avoiding the knee that surged up toward his head. “Fine.”

He got back to work.

…

After ten or twelve more such nights, the wondering settled more into certainty. Something else had settled—a sort-of resigned disappointment, a bitter ache, that there was a very obvious reason Loki wouldn’t tell him. One of a couple obvious reasons, really, but …

He finally decided to talk … to Thor.

Close enough.

He timed his approach one evening when Natasha and Clint had taken Steve to a film festival showing of some old Thin Man flicks. Bruce had already turned in for what he called his “introvert time,” and Loki had taken Fray somewhere in the Midwest—Tony wasn’t sure where, but he’d promised their son a hayride and some fresh corn on the cob, and Fray damn well was going to get pulled behind a tractor while gnawing on sweetcorn.

He figured he had about an hour before even Loki felt guilty about “your pedestrian ideas of mortal bedtimes, Stark,” and eagerly brought the whining toddler back for a bath and his crib.

So: balcony, where Thor was watching over both the stars above and the lights and movement of the city below.

“Hey, big man.” The glass door slid shut behind him. He crossed over the concrete to join Thor at the guardrail.

“Tony!” That smile was blinding and ever-genuine, and Tony always marvelled at how Thor was able to make everyone feel good just by being around him. (Well, maybe not Loki, but … whatever.) “It is good to have your companionship. But I would have expected you to use this rare solitude for work.”

“Yeah, I probably should do that.” Tony leaned on the guardrail a foot or so away from the other. “I was kind of hoping to talk to you.”

“Oh?” Thor turned toward him. “Is everything all right? What occupies your thoughts?”

“Big guy, I don’t even know how to start—so I’m just going to start—”

The change in Thor’s expression wasn’t dramatic, but it was noticeable. Thor would never win any prizes for deception.

“—or … maybe I don’t have to.”

“Nay, speak your thoughts, Tony. I would hear them.”

Tony rubbed his right hand over his face, covering his mouth for just a moment. Then he looked away from Thor. “He’s pregnant, isn’t he.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Tony saw Thor turn back to the scene below as well.

“I have suspected it, aye.”

“But he hasn’t said anything.”

“No, I—I had hoped you knew, one way or the other. That he had told you.”

Tony laughed bitterly. “Same here.

“I gotta tell ya—I can’t think of any good reasons he’s not telling me, Thor.” He looked down at his hand on the railing, wiggled his fingers slightly as he counted. “One, he gives so little a shit about me that he can’t be bothered. Or he thinks I’m such a shitty dad that he doesn’t see the point—I guess that’d be one-B. Two, he’s not planning on having it. For some reason—”

“Tony, I don’t think—”

“Or three, it’s not mine. No point in telling me if I wasn’t the one who signed my name to it, so to speak.”

“Tony—”

“What? Is there something I’m not thinking of here? Because, let me tell you, I don’t see … Okay, four, he’s waiting until our anniversary to tell me the good news over a candlelight dinner.”

Thor brightened. “You mark an ann—”

“ _No,_ Thor, we don’t have an anniversary—that’s my goddamned point.” Tony growled. “He’s not telling me for some goddamned shitty reason, that’s why, and I don’t know if it’s better if the kid isn’t mine, or if it’s better that Loki thinks I’m so beneath him that he can’t be assed to let me know we’re having another one.”

“So, you don’t truly believe he wishes not to have it.”

“Thor, if he didn’t want to have it, it would already be gone … wouldn’t it?”

“It’s likely, aye.” Thor was quiet for a moment. “Why have you not asked him yourself?”

Tony let out another frustrated noise. “Because I’m being stupid here. Because—because I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want to know the answer. If I piss him off—more than normal—it’s going to fuck up this situation. He might leave Fray, or, God, he might take Fray away again. He … he can’t take Fray away, Thor. Whatever the fuck this is, whatever we’re doing, it’s working. Or, at least, I thought it was working, sort of. Now I’m not so sure.”

By the time he was done, he knew the expression he was seeing on Thor’s face—a perfect blend of fondness and pity. “I wish I knew what to tell you, Tony Stark. But, as you say, if he didn’t want the child, we wouldn’t be discussing this now. But, beyond that, if he meant to take Fray and go, he would have left already. My brother is not without power or the ability to find, or create, allies. It is comfortable here for him, yes, but he—as you know—doesn’t suffer fools gladly.”

Thor took a breath, looked toward the other buildings, but without really seeing them, as far as Tony could tell. Finally, he continued. “To be crystal clear in my meaning, my friend, this situation has been working for him as well. So far as I can tell.”

Tony sighed. Yeah, fucking Thor—his magical ability, beyond the whole thunder thing: Making everyone feel better. All in all, not a bad power to have.

Still, Tony was left with an aching dismay in his gut, of a puzzle he needed to solve without getting anyone hurt in the meantime.

…

It all came to a head, unsurprisingly, at one in the morning, when Fray had screamed from his crib two doors down, and it had taken them an hour to calm him down and persuade him to go back to sleep.

Tony was desperately in need of sleep himself, having pushed past his normal thirty-hour limit for wakefulness in non-crisis times, and Loki was practically vibrating. Tony had discovered early on that Loki had never formed a callus against the distress of his children. He achieved a profound level of anxiety in the dark hours of Fray’s (“normal, babe—it’s normal”) night terrors, so profound that Tony wasn’t always certain who needed comfort more.

Of course, by two a.m., Tony’s ability to comfort either had long faded, and he sat on the sofa in the master-bedroom suite, glowering, counting the reasons not to drink. Elbows on knees, Tony pressed his hands together, remembering that he needed to stay extra sober on nights when the nanny was off.

Loki glided into the room, stopping just inside the door. “Are you coming to bed?” Loki only moved that carefully when he was exhausted, and Tony could hear it in his voice.

He looked up from his clenched hands. If anything, in the thin cotton sleep pants and old t-shirt that he wore (Tony’s), Loki looked … bigger. Wider. It didn’t help that the shirt, which was fitted for a smaller man, pulled up to expose a sliver of that rounded abdomen.

The bitterness finally broke through. With a painful smile, he gritted out, “Are you pregnant?”

The frown on Loki’s face faded to blankness, and he offered, simply, “Yes.”

Tony bowed his head, shook it as his hands came up to cradle his face. After a moment, he stood up. “It’s mine.” He didn’t pose it as a question, but he waited for an answer anyway.

The answer came in the look of disbelief that crossed Loki’s features. “It’s—” He stopped, took a step back, and raised his hand to the doorframe, gripping it tightly. “Who else do you think I’ve been fucking, Stark?”

“I don’t know. I would have assumed the actual father would have known already.”

Loki smiled, then gestured to himself with his free hand. “ _He_ does know. And you eventually figured it out, didn’t you?”

“Great. That’s just— Yeah. Okay, well, fuck you.”

And with that, Tony pushed past Loki and headed toward the bar.

…

If Tony—secretly—wanted the explosive blow-up he felt he was due, he was disappointed.

Loki had never emerged from the bedroom, and, after two hours of self-righteous steaming alternating with attempts at therapeutic breathing exercises, Tony crept back into their bedroom to find the god … asleep. The light next to what had turned into Tony’s “side” was still on, and Loki was twisted away from it, his back to the door.

But then he spoke: “Are you finished being ridiculous?”

Tony started, surprised. “Ah, goddamn it.” The little scare had reignited his anger. “Are you finished being an asshole?”

Loki shifted, turning back to look at the man. A small smile quirked the corner of his mouth. “Probably not.”

And that smile, the tolerant expression, doused Tony’s ire just as quickly. He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Why not just tell me?”

“You make so much of your own intelligence, Stark—I wanted to see how long it took you to figure it out.” A pause. Then, drily, “You shouldn’t make so much of your own intelligence.”

“I was waiting for you to tell me!”

A small “hm” was the only response, but Loki still looked somewhat amused.

Loki moved fully onto his back, and Tony's eyes again were drawn to the exposed stretch of belly under his navel. He secretly hoped he could keep Loki in his old shirts for a good bit longer.

“Are you still angry?”

“No, not really. But … “ He shrugged. “When you didn’t tell me, I kind of assumed the worst. And I still … I just don’t know.”

Loki considered him thoughtfully.

“That I chose to bear another of your children, Stark,” he said quietly, “should be all I need to tell you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Lots of feelings about this story/pairing. I started yet another "and then they talk forever at the end" wrapup, realized I've done that to death, deleted it all, and wrapped it up using just the core elements. 
> 
> But ... why didn't Loki consider Tony's opinion in making baby 2, and why didn't he tell him? Because he's Loki, goddammit. And Odin figures in, and past kids figure in, and he's going to just do what he wants at this point. This situation currently works for him ... but he's keeping his options open, as we revisit in "The Same Deep Water as You." 
> 
> So, what's Tony getting out of it? Godling children, and a total respite from boredom. 
> 
> Do they love each other? I guess it depends on your point of view. Is the glass half-empty, or half-full? 
> 
> Thanks for reading, y'all! You can find me publicly hand-wringing over my writing, or fangirling over other people's, on Tumblr: [http://hannahrhen.tumblr.com/](http://hannahrhen.tumblr.com)


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